A few weeks ago, I highlighted some of the most popular posts in Metamodern’s first year (see “Knowledge about Knowledge…”). Posts that offer videos, documents, or talk slides also ranked high:
With downloadable documents and talk slides:
- Molecular Nanomachines: Physical Principles and Implementation Strategies
- My MIT dissertation — a draft of Nanosystems — is now online
- Slides for Talk on Nanotechnology and Computational Challenges
- Slides for Berkeley Talk on Molecular Nanosystems
- The Technology Roadmap Translated: Russian
With molecular videos:
With videos of machines making things at blazing speeds:
- High-Throughput Nanomanufacturing: Small Parts
- High-Throughput Nanomanufacturing: Assembly
- High-Throughput Nanomanufacturing: Assembling larger products
More:
A challenge question:
Measured by cumulative traffic, one post on Metamodern ranks well above the rest. It was neither very recent, nor very early, nor on any of the topics above. Which one is it, and why is it popular? (Actually, I’m baffled by the second part of the question.)
And the answer is… What’s in the Vault?, popular via StumbleUpon. It’s about a minor mystery in molecular biology.
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Garson 11.20.09 at 8:43 am UTC
I would guess that the popular post is titled A DNA Origami Box.
To construct this hypothesis I typed “metamodern” into the Google search box and determined which individual article appeared near the top of the search results. Since “A DNA Origami Box” was listed second below the link to the home page of the blog I used that ranking as an admittedly flawed proxy for popularity and traffic.
Originally Google used a “page rank” algorithm for ordering search results. That suggests “A DNA Origami Box” has a large number of incoming links from other highly ranked websites. However, Google has repeatedly re-tuned their algorithm. Today’s algorithm may also incorporate data concerning the number of times a link is clicked when it appears in the list of search results.
Eric Drexler 11.20.09 at 10:23 pm UTC
Garson, that is a good methodology, but it hasn’t given the right answer. I wish that the answer it did give were correct, because the most popular post is (unfortunately) about a topic less worthy of attention.